


You Don't Get To Decide.

by Miri1984



Category: Marvel Comics - Fandom, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 03:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miri1984/pseuds/Miri1984
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a short drabble based on the Cracksmash RP we’ve been doing lately because OH MY GOD THE FEELS LATELY. And it doesn’t help that I just watched the Jefferson episode of Once Upon A Time and THE PARALLELS and GAH CRACKSMASH YOU ARE GOING TO KILL ME.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Don't Get To Decide.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [historymiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/gifts).



**_“It’s hard enough to live in a land where you don’t belong but knowing it? Holding conflicting realities in your head? Will drive you mad.”_ **

-Jefferson (The Mad Hatter - Once Upon a Time)

_“I - oh god. You shoulda killed me, Steve._

_I remember everything.”_

What did you think? That you could bring him back with no consequences? That you could snap your fingers and go back to the train and start again from there, make it so there were two of you in the ice instead of just one, frozen together instead of ripped apart.

Kept safe.

_“I never really knew what year it was. Never really cared. It was like- you wake up, in the middle of the night, and you go back to sleep. You lose all sense of time. Of yourself.”_

While he’s sleeping you try to capture the changes. The stupid hair, yeah, Buck would have hated that, the clothes, nondescript, but screaming efficiency in a way that would alert a specially trained eye, the metal arm lying so it catches the autumn light from the big window. You have to keep telling yourself that this isn’t the Bucky you knew, because the pencil wants to follow the forms you’ve followed for so long, when you first started drawing him because it was easier to look at your friend than ask one of the others to sit still enough to use as a model, because no matter how much he swore at you he knew why you were doing it and why you didn’t have anyone else to ask.

_“Why do you draw so many pictures of me, Steve, what’s the point of being able to draw if you don’t draw dames?”_

_“I do draw dames, Bucky. But dames aren’t the only people in the world, much as you might wish otherwise.”_

_“Huh. There are other guys too you know.”_

_“How many other guys would sit still enough for me to look at their ugly mugs long enough to get the proportions right?”_

_“You never get the proportions right, you jerk. I always look stupid.”_

_“Because your face is hard. You’ve got that stupid chin and those ridiculous lips, Buck, I’m not gonna even mention the hair… you’re like a character from a comic book and if I can make you look real on paper I can draw anything.”_

Eventually you can do it, separate the Bucky in your head from the Bucky who is here (alive! a part of you wants to scream) and the picture takes form, and when you finish it you keep the pencil in your hand because you can’t quite believe it. He’s aged. It’s not just the hair. There are lines there that weren’t before, something in the set of the jaw even in sleep and you don’t know if you want to tear it out and start again because looking at the drawing makes you look at the man and realize those lines don’t come from love or laughter or fulfillment, they don’t come from anywhere else and you never wanted anyone to have lines like those and now you’re responsible for giving them to the two people you loved most in the world and… now that it’s on paper. It’s real. And you can’t take it back. Because you did it.

Thinking this is the Bucky you knew before the war would be a mistake. 

Thinking this is the Bucky you knew after the serum would be another.

_“You don’t know what I’ve done. The things I’ve trained others to do. You think you know what happened to me? Whatever they told you hasn’t even scratched the surface, and I know that for sure cause if you even knew half of what I remember you would have put a bullet right between my eyes.”_

The gun is pointed at your chest and Natasha is coiled tight as a spring and you _know_ she’s capable of killing him and they both know he is capable of killing you but you didn’t come here for anyone to die and so you toss him the tesseract and you tell him to remember and you think, somehow that that’s going to change things for the _better…_

_“You don’t get to decide that, Steve.”_

You don’t get to decide.


End file.
